ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been a lively discourse on the globalization of political marketing among scholars around the world. Modern and postmodern campaigning seem to have not only become dominant forces in advanced democracies but have also made major inroads into the political domains of newly democratized polities. The global trend toward the adoption of this new media and money driven modus operandi of political campaigns seems to be unstoppable. But there still are several questions to be addressed: how effective is (post)modern campaigning? Will it be able to completely substitute pre-modern forms of electoral processes? What are the limitations of (post)modern campaigning? These questions are of great significance especially when talking about electoral campaigning in societies that have transformed from agrarian to (post)modern within a few decades. In this chapter, I would like to answer this set of questions by looking at the evolution and the current modus operandi of modern electoral campaigning in Taiwan, one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.
